Indoo Ships Your Textbooks To You When They Feel Like It

By cwaltersSeptember 19, 2008

Don’t order textbooks from Indoo.com if you need them right away, because they’re a little casual with their shipping. Joe ordered two textbooks on September 5th. Four days later on September 9th, they sent him an email saying they’d been shipped via USPS Priority mail. They hadn’t arrived by the 16th, so Joe emailed to ask what was going on. They responded that actually the books had been shipped on September 11th via USPS Priority and that “the arrival expectation is 4 to 5 business days.” Joe received one of the two books yesterday, on September 17th, which would have been 5 business days after the 11th. Still no sign of the other book.

After this experience, Joe started looking online, and he found similar stories from frustrated shoppers. A customer on Pricegrabber from this summer wrote:

I ordered two books, paid for expedited shipping, and have just received one book after 12 days. No idea where the other book is, and they did not provide tracking information (even after I contacted them 5 days ago to get tracking / shipment details). On the 3rd part bookseller website, the order was listed as being shipped / completed 8 days ago but when I checked the USPS tracking info on my package it was listed as being shipped 2 days ago. That means they falsely listed the order as having shipped 6 days before they actually put it in the mail.

There’s another personal account of an Indoo shipping fiasco on this livejournal page.

We might have been willing to cut Indoo a little slack, except they never responded to Joe’s follow up email, nor did they acknowledge or apologize for the misreported shipping date in the single response they did send him.

Joe adds,

Frankly, the only reason I ordered from them was because I read about a bookseller aggregator on Lifehacker or Consumerist and Indoo came up as cheapest/fastest for both books. I was a bad consumerist since I didn’t do my research on them first. Would have saved me some aggravation. Maybe a post on Consumerist would keep someone else from making the same mistake.